This paper presents a joint economic lot size model for a single manufacturer-a single buyer. The purposed model involves the greenhouse gas emission from industrial and transport sectors. We divide the emission into two types, namely the direct and indirect emissions. In this paper, we consider the Government’s penalty and incentive policies to reduce the emission. We assume that the demand of the buyer is normally distributed and partially backordered. The objective is to minimize joint total cost incurred by a single manufacturer-a single buyer and involves the transportation costs of the freight forwarder. Transportation costs are the function of shipping weight, distance, fuel price and consumption with two transportation modes: truckload and less-than-truckload shipments. Finally, an algorithm procedure is proposed to determine the optimal order quantity, safety factor, actual shipping weight, total emission and frequency of deliveries. Numerical examples and analyses are given to illustrate the results.

Hsu and Hsu (2013a) established a closed-form solution for an EOQ model with imperfect quality items, inspection errors, shortage backordering, and sales returns, where the customers who return the defective items will receive full price refunds; i.e., the returned items are not replaced with good items. In this note, we extend Hsu and Hsu & apos; s (2013a) work to consider the case that returned items are replaced with good items. A closed-form solution is developed for the optimal order size and the maximum shortage level. Numerical examples are provided to show the differences in the optimal solutions when returned items are replaced, and when they are not.

The purpose of these comments is to serve as a revision to the article by Khan et al. (2016) [Khan, M., Jaber, M.Y., Zanoni, S., & Zavanella, L. (2016). Vendor managed inventory with consignment stock agreement for a supply chain with defective items. Applied Mathematical Modelling, 40(15–16), 7102–7114.]. This commenting paper suggests that the expected total cost function derived in Khan et al. (2016) was incorrect, and then offers revisions to complement the shortcomings.

The purpose of these comments is to serve as a revision to the article by Khan, Jaber, & Bonney [2011, An economic order quantity (EOQ) for items with imperfect quality and inspection errors, International Journal of Production Economics, 133: 113–118]. This commenting paper first suggests that the revenue function derived in Khan et al. (2011) is unrealistic, and then offers revisions to complement the shortcomings.

The efficient evaluation of technological innovation capabilities of enterprises is an important factor to enhance competitiveness. This paper aims to assess and to rank technological innovation evaluation criteria in order to provide a practical insight of systematic analysis by gathering the qualified experts’ opinions combined with three methods of multi-criteria decision making approach. A framework is proposed and uses a novel hybrid multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) model to address the dependence relationships of criteria with the aid of the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), analytical network process (ANP) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje). The study reports that the interaction between criteria is essential and influences technological innovation capabilities; furthermore, this ranking development of technological innovation capabilities assessment is also one of key management tools for managements of other related high- tech enterprises. Managers can then judge the need to improve and determine which criteria provide the most effective direction towards improvement.

This study examines how preferences for honesty affect two-period audit policy. We categorize the audited as either fully honest (i.e. the ethical) or self-interested and rational (i.e. the economic) to deal with the issue of audit policy. As a result, we find the conditional audit policy will be an optimal audit policy only if the incentive for the economic to cheat is sufficiently large and the proportion of the ethical in all audited is relatively moderate,. Otherwise, the conditional audit policy will be dominated by other audit policy. These results suggest that firms are likely able to design a more efficient audit policy if they take into account the honesty preferences of the audited.

The investigation of dynamic response of intervertebral disc is beneficial for the development of new synthetic and engineered tissues for treating diseased or injured disc. There are limited experimental studies on comparing the effect of loading mode and rate on global response of intervertebral disc. In this study, in-vitro experiments were performed using a total of 24 porcine motion segments. The harvested specimens were assigned to prolong and 2 different cyclic loadings. Both disc deformations and water contents were measured to investigate how the mode and rate of loading affect the response of intervertebral disc. In parallel, a backward FE poroelastic model combined with in-vitro experiments were used to find the material properties of intervertebral discs. The experimental result showed that the final disc height loss under creep loading was significantly greater than cyclic groups. Increasing the frequency of cyclic loading decreased the disc height loss. The water content decreased significantly in cyclic loading from those in prolong loading. The backward FE models showed that, the elastic modulus of anulus fibrosus and nucleus pulposus were 2.43 (±0.48) MPa and 1.46 (±0.29) MPa, respectively. The hydraulic permeability was 2.08 (±0.42) ×10-16m4/Ns, and the Poisson’s ratio was 0.21 (±0.03). In conclusion, this study investigated how the loading mode and rate affect porcine intervertebral disc deformation. It is found that dynamic stiffness is greater at higher frequencies which resulted from interactions between the solid phase and fluid flow within the disc.

Global supply chains have to manage production over the whole world. Therefore, production plants are needed to supply the demand of products and parts. Due to complication and uncertainty of production market, portfolio selection is one of the most challenging problems. Type-2(T2) fuzzy is a model, which provides the ability to handle the effect of uncertainty. Aiming at this problem, we propose a T2 supplier management system operation scheme, which not only employs fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm by dynamically increasing cluster center, but also it achieves good classification performance. The key result is that fuzzy classification applications improve the planning and operating of supply and demand in a distributed production and global supply chain.

In this paper, a multi products single machine economic production quantity model withdiscrete delivery is developed. A unique cycle length is considered for all produced items withan assumption that all products are manufactured on a single machine with a limited capacity.The proposed model considers different items such as production, setup, holding, andtransportation costs. The resulted model is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinearprogramming model. Harmony search algorithm, extended cutting plane and particle swarmoptimization methods are used to solve the proposed model. Two numerical examples are usedto analyze and to evaluate the performance of the proposed model.

This paper proposes the social network analysis (SNA), to study interaction among variousactivities in a product development process (PDP). The implementation of SNA helps tomeasure the properties of information flow and identifies PDP activities and limitations. Thefindings of an exploratory research project which explores the potential of SNA, as an improvetool for visually mapping and analyzing the stakeholders relationships found across the ICsubstrates design/manufacturing’s PDP of the Unimicron Technology Corp. From the findings,the authors prescribe the necessary SNA recommendations to improve the social conditionswithin the PDP.